Female corporeality in the Thirdspace music videos of FKA twigs

Abstract

Abstract As a technology of gender, the music video genre has consistently acted to represent women as sexually available. Patriarchal discourses have been inscribed onto the bodies of women, in an industry predominantly controlled by white, male record executives. Gendered representations are constructed by the music video technology, but are also absorbed by viewers. British singer, songwriter and dancer FKA twigs’ self-directed music videos challenge the sexualization of women. The artist offers viewers an intense bodily experience of femininity, devoid of Mulvey’s ‘male gaze’. This article argues the complex representation of the artist’s body using corporeal feminist theory and posthuman notions of the cyborg. FKA twigs’ representations of female sexuality and the cyborg are considered in three music videos. The article explores the texts as a Thirdspace, resisting and encompassing dichotomized discourses such as masculine–feminine, inside–outside, intellect–emotion, organic– artificial. The strong, permeable, cyborg body of FKA twigs occupies a Thirdspace of corporeal subjectivity resisting patriarchal discourses that suggest the female body exists to be looked at.